From Publishers Weekly
Currin is currently generating the kind of buzz that purchased publicity alone can't account for, and it's easy to see why: his paintings' smoothly executed combination of droll social commentary, offhand reference to old masters and va-va-va-voom sexuality is hard to look away from-and easy to argue about. Unlike his colleague in pneumatic inspiration, Lisa Yuskavage, Currin can't hide behind presumptive feminist theory. Are the anatomically impossible figures Currin so lovingly depicts pitiable projections of an arrested sexuality or a brave exploration of (in the words of essayist Rosenblum) "the crumbling myths and icons of twentieth-century America, revealing, as in a warped looking glass, their bizarre surface and their dark underside"? Given that America's "dark underside" has been exposed almost as often as its "innocence" has been violated, such critical formulations could easily be mistaken for intellectual window dressing. But a combination of confident execution and the often subtle referencing of everyone from Vargas to Lucas Cranach means that although there may not be more to Currin's paintings than meets the eye, what meets the eye holds interest beyond the immediate moment of shock or titillation. Currin is his own best advocate here; his long interview with Rochelle Steiner-bluntly plainspoken, knowledgeable and entirely pleased with the fuss his work has caused-candidly reveals an engaging and unashamed artist on the make. The essays, as the quote from Rosenblum would indicate, are competent in a manner endemic to books like this. But neither interview nor essays can begin to compete with the 79 lush color reproductions, whose accumulation of craftily mixed signals is disturbing and compulsive.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Los Angeles Times
"[The] Goya of the Golden Girls."
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Book Description
A trip to Currin-land is like a science-fiction movie, in which familiar things-Old Master works by Bruegel and Courbet, the Rococo idylls of Boucher and Fragonard, girly photos from 1960s men's magazines, and cheerful ads for wholesome American products-are transformed into figurative paintings that border on the freakish. In John Currin's universe, everything looks both commonplace and fantastic, like Norman Rockwell paintings as seen through a fun-house mirror.
Esteemed art critic Robert Rosenblum reviews Currin's output of the past 10 years in this choice monograph-the first major book on Currin's white-hot career. Seventy-five provocatively titled colorplates exemplify the artist's trademark collision of classical technique and 20th-century kitsch. Currin has already caught the attention of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. And what reader wouldn't be curious to see Bea Arthur Naked (1991)?
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Publisher comments
"As important an emerging painter as today's art world supplies."-The New Yorker
"[The] Goya of the Golden Girls."-Los Angeles Times
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